Update to meditation grief essay: 2 months later

Most of the effects have remained, and I'm having a great time

Thank you to everyone who read and engaged with my last post about meditation-induced grief. I received a lot of kind messages and thoughtful questions. Some were curious about how the changes I experienced were holding up (and so was I!). It’s usually hard for me to tell what will stick from a meditation high until at least one or two menstrual cycles have passed because my luteal phase has a tendency to add noise to the bodily system such that if I’m feeling more sensitive or low-energy I can’t tell if it’s because of regular hormonal fluctuations or the fading of meditation aftereffects. It’s been two full cycles since the initial shift happened so I wanted to check in. A lot of effects I mentioned in my first post have remained, and I’ve noticed some new ones too as more time has passed.

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Illustration by Kenji Tsuruta from the manga Memories of Emanon

In no particular order, here are some observations two months out:

• Some of my neuroses came back (maybe 20% strength instead of a full return) and I was really relieved. It was like seeing an old friend. I’ve never been so glad to be slightly neurotic. They felt different though: they occur more as habitual “suggestions” triggered by specific contexts/schemas for how I should behave, like gentle bids for my attention in the form of push notifications, instead of “DO THIS OR YOU ARE DOOMED” flashing panic bedazzled Vegas billboards, which is how they used to feel. They’re a lot more manageable in the moment (which looks like shrugging my shoulder and deciding—eh, it’s not a big deal) and in general when I want to uproot/work with them directly so they don’t keep arising. I expect them to keep declining in strength over time with more meditation and untangling.

• Spaciousness in all directions is still there. My surroundings feel airy like cotton candy or an impressionist painting. I no longer feel like I’m going to fall through the floor, probably because I have walked enough in the last two months to train my brain and body into believing the ground is, contrary to their suspicions, actually solid, but it does feel like I’m situated in some arbitrary point in space. Lightness by default is really enjoyable, especially when compared to the bodily heaviness of depression or rubber bouncy ball contractions of anxiety.

• Time is still strange. I will start an activity and often find that twice the amount of time I would have guessed has elapsed. I’m still late to everything. Got it down to ten minutes late instead of twenty, and luckily none of my friends have chewed me out for it yet, but I hope to one day train myself to be on time again.

• I am worse at certain specific cognitive tasks (such as those that require a laser beam of attention), multi-tasking, and rapid task-switching. I’m less eloquent and less sharp, but my attention is more relaxed, diffuse, and poised to handle surprises. Nowadays a friend will ask me to explain something and an unclear, unsatisfactory answer comes out of my mouth. I express what immediately comes to mind, but I haven’t run the search on my whole mental landscape to find what I would consider the most eloquent and optimal answer. This used to come to me easily in the moment, but now happens hours or days after when I reflect on how I could have handled the exchange better. I’ve learned to be okay with this and to save the eloquence for the writing.¹ They’re not looking for the best answer I could have given, and a conversation is just volleying interests back and forth.

• I still experience little to no social anxiety. People feel viscerally “safe” to me in a way they never felt before at baseline. They drain my social energy less and I can socialize for 6-9 hours a day before feeling like I need alone time to recharge. Socializing has historically taken a lot of energy so this was really strange and novel to me. I had a “Wait, is this how extroverts feel?!” kind of revelation and tried to push it all the way to find the limits to my new capacity, the way waking up, say, to find my grip strength had tripled would tempt me to grab and squeeze random objects. This was one reason I was socializing so much, but another was—and I have nothing to back this up—I have a hunch that certain meditative shifts open up a new critical period for attachment and it felt important for me to surround myself with people in the weeks after to concretely and non-verbally demonstrate to my emotional system that people were safe to be around. I do think this worked. After about 2 weeks, I felt like I had socialized enough. I learned that I love hanging out with people, but in many cases I love getting lost in my thoughts, curiosities, and writing more, and all the socializing didn’t leave enough time for that. Hence, I’m still introverted and had to dial back—not due to strict energetic constraints like before, but prioritization of what I value. It’s nice to know I at least have the capacity.

• Emotions are weird and different. I feel them almost entirely in the body now, and to make sense of them I have to poke around and translate into words (“Is it this I’m feeling? No not quite…how about this?”). Before, I could tell you exactly what I was feeling at any given time and trace the source quickly. The amount of inner clarity I used to have is bewildering to me now. It was a byproduct of my compulsion to make sense of my experience, analyze it, put it in words. Since that has relaxed, I give myself more space to just feel and not need to make sense of things. I’ve been journaling less. It’s frustrating though, being bad at a thing you were really good at before even if it was for slightly unhealthy reasons. It doesn’t help that things like IFS now seem entirely nonsensical because, what self? What is there to defend? Why are you dividing yourself up into parts?

• I enjoy music less now. I’m a bit bummed by this, because I’ve been obsessed with listening to music my whole life, but I think this may be for the better. Before, it used to strongly emotionally hook me and my attention would contort around it, resulting in full body sensations, frisson, feelings of meaning and catharsis. To a large degree, I was using it to regulate my nervous system (e.g. if I was down, I’d either lean into sad music to process those emotions and resolve the discomfort, or put on upbeat music to give me more energy). Now…it’s hard to describe, but it’s like music is just…sound now? And I pick up on the sounds as “one among many things going on in the environment” the way I would pick up on honks or bird chirps, but they’ve lost much of their magnetic draw and command over my attention. I still really enjoy it, but I depend on it less and regard it more neutrally.

• Still stand by the 90% reduction in suffering claim. I’ve never been happier as a baseline. I’ve been hypomanic, but that felt brittle. This is more of a resilient peaceful contentedness, and my conscious experience rests on a feathery bed of that. Many days it is uneventful. It often looks like waking up feeling like it’s a wonderful day for no reason other than the fact that it feels so. I usually experience a mood dip before my period, and I had a bit of that, but I also had a moment where I had a headache and was grumpy from being tired, but I still felt really good. Like, I realized that being in pain or discomfort was just another experience I could have in the range of conscious experiences available to me in this life. So both of these things were true: I was in pain and discomfort, and I was happy as hell to be here to experience the pain and discomfort, and this was possible because I wasn’t resisting it. Sometimes it’s like: Oh, this is the good part, and it’s beautiful. And this is the bad part, the tense part, the nervous part, and it’s beautiful too.

1. I find solace in the Susan Sontag quote about this: “It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means. Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”